ArWiki Rolls Out Upgraded Version 2 With New Smart Contract And Big Features

Arwiki, a decentralised application that publishes Arweave-related technical information, has rolled out big upgrades to its smart contract with a series of features, including language and stamps to incentivise contributors, its lead developer, Ricky Guzmán told Permaweb News on Thursday.

The upgrade called ArWiki v2, which uses Angular v15 as its web development framework, had been in the works since the beginning of this year. The project was launched in August 2021.

ArWiki works like Wikipedia but on a decentralised platform that is open to contributions from all and stores contents on the permanent web, removing the risk of being maliciously altered. All contents are stored as transactions on the Arweave blockchain.

The update allows moderators to add languages, a feature which helps the ArWiki to better serve growing user base and boost adoption of Arweave by non-english speaking users. This was impossible in ArWiki v1.

At the moment, ArWiki is collaborating with PermaDAO to translate technical documents for the Chinese Arweave community while it has also added the Ukrainian language to its platform. Guzmán said the platform would love to add more languages such as Arabic and Hebrew and ArWiki and collaborators willing to work with it could reach out.

ArWiki was designed to support multiple languages from the start… Multi-language support has helped us meet new friends and collaborators from all over the world, Guzmán said.

Users who like what they read on the ArWiki page can now stamp articles. Stamping an article enables a writer to get some STAMP token. This adds to the incentives contributors get when they are published on ArWiki.

Developers also considered the health implication of a prolonged screen time on users of Arwiki as they use the information on the website. Multiple themes, including light, dark, yellow and peach were created to help reduce eye strain. Language selection option was also added to the new version.

The update allows users to select their preferred gateway. The gateways are arweave.net; ar-io.net; g8way.io; arweave.dev. This feature could also be a way out of a situation where users have difficulty using the primary gateway. Guzmán listed reasons why glitches could occur in the primary gateway to include network issues and censorship.

Unlike regular websites, ArWiki does not collect information or track the activities of users. ArWiki said it does not use cookies. Instead, it uses local storage and session storage for proper functioning of the website.

For us, we prefer not to track the activity of our users… We do our best to respect the privacy of our visitors and are aware that these services often collect too much information without visitors being aware that they are being tracked, Guzmán said.